The Plan I — Separation and the Land Transfer

This is the first of two chapters describing the plan itself. It covers the physical architecture — the new border, the relocations, the buffer, the land transfer, and the connections that make one state out of two wings. The next chapter covers the mechanism that keeps the peace.

The new border

On a date of its choosing, Israel declares its permanent international border. The line is drawn once, unilaterally, according to two principles that pull against each other and must both be honored: absorb the maximum share of the Israeli settler population without moving anyone, and leave the Palestinian state contiguous, coherent, and viable. Where the two principles collide, the plan resolves the collision with engineering (see "One state, two wings," below) and with land (see "The transfer").

In practice this means annexing the major settlement blocs: Ma'ale Adumim, the Gush Etzion bloc, Modi'in Illit, Beitar Illit, Givat Ze'ev, and — reaching deeper into the West Bank — Ariel and several of its satellite settlements. These blocs hold the large majority of the roughly half-million Israelis living beyond the Green Line, so annexation brings over 90% of the settler population inside Israel's new borders without a single family moving house. From that day, the word "settler" retires in these towns. They are Israeli municipalities, inside Israel, and the plan calls for a deliberate wave of national investment to bind them into the country's fabric.

One honesty is owed here, because informed readers will notice it anyway. Most prior frameworks — the Clinton Parameters, Geneva, the Olmert map — treated the blocs adjacent to the Green Line as annexable and drew the line at Ariel, twenty kilometers deep. This plan departs from that consensus deliberately. The political reality after October 7 is that no Israeli government of any composition will remove a city of twenty thousand people, and a plan that pretends otherwise is a plan for the shelf. The departure has a price, and the plan pays it openly: the deeper the Ariel finger reaches, the more the map owes Palestinians elsewhere — which is part of why the land transfer below is sized the way it is, and why the connectivity engineering around the finger is treated as a first-order obligation rather than an afterthought.

The full settlement-by-settlement schedule — every community, its population, its disposition, and, for those relocated, its designated destination — is published as Annex A. The exact placement of the line around individual communities is among the questions the working group is assembled to finalize; the principles above are not.

The relocations

The Israelis who remain outside the new border — those living deep in the West Bank, beyond any line that leaves Palestine viable — are relocated into Israel. The document's working estimate is on the order of 25,000–40,000 people; the precise figure follows from the final line and is accounted community by community in Annex A.

The plan is deliberate about learning from the 2005 disengagement, which remains a national wound less because of what was done than how: communities uprooted with no destination, scattered into hotel rooms and caravan parks, some waiting years for permanent housing. This plan inverts every element of that failure. Destinations exist before anyone moves — new neighborhoods in the annexed blocs, in most cases a few kilometers down the road from the evacuated community, built and ready. Communities move as communities, with their institutions, synagogues, and schools relocated together, not dissolved into a housing lottery. Compensation is generous, published in advance, and structured to reward early voluntary relocation. And the timeline is humane — measured in a small number of years, with the border declared and the deterrence architecture operative long before the last community moves.

None of this makes the relocations painless, and the plan does not claim it. It claims something narrower: that a bounded, compensated, well-executed relocation of tens of thousands — hard as it is — is a price Israel can actually pay, once, for permanent recognized borders; whereas the alternative is paying forever, in soldiers, in isolation, and in wars, for borders that never arrive.

The buffer and the two barriers

Along the entire new frontier runs a buffer zone — patrolled, monitored, and permanently uninhabited, generally 500 meters to a kilometer wide. No one lives in it, farms it, or builds in it, on either side, ever. It is walled by two barriers, and the asymmetry between them is deliberate and load-bearing.

On the Israeli side stands the permanent barrier: heavy, deep, sensor-laden, engineered against tunneling and incursion. It carries the entire defensive burden, and it never moves — not one meter, in any direction, for any reason, forever. It is the physical form of the plan's first promise: Israel's borders are fixed in space.

On the Palestinian side runs a lighter demarcation barrier — a marked, monitored line engineered from the outset to be movable. Why the plan would deliberately build a movable border barrier is the subject of the next chapter; for now it is enough to say that the permanence of the first barrier is precisely what makes the mobility of the second one safe.

The transfer

Unilateral annexation, standing alone, is theft, and the plan does not dress it up otherwise. What prevents it from being theft is the other half of the exchange: simultaneously with annexation, Israel transfers sovereign territory from Israel proper to the new State of Palestine — a transfer with no precedent in the history of this conflict, and one that leaves Palestine larger than the territory Palestinians hold today. Visibly larger, on any map.

Two tracts pass to the new state:

• New Gaza — roughly 730 km² of the Negev along the Egyptian border, appended to the Gaza Strip and roughly tripling its territory. Gaza is the most crowded place in this conflict; New Gaza is where it gets room to breathe — the site of the new cities, industrial zones, and development corridors described in Annex C.
• SoWeBa (the South-West Bank tract) — roughly 250 km² appended to the southwestern West Bank, partially offsetting the area lost to the annexed blocs and giving the Hebron region its own share of the new-land horizon.

A drawing rule governs both tracts: their boundaries are set so that no existing Israeli community falls within them — the transfer is of land, not of anyone's home, in either direction.

The arithmetic of the whole exchange:

The new state begins at 110% of what Palestinians hold today — roughly 40% of the non-desert land between the river and the sea, for about 45% of its population. And 110% is the ceiling, permanently, for both sides: Israel can never take beyond the schedule described in the next chapter, and no amount of Palestinian quiet ever adds a meter beyond the brim. The state is born at its forever-maximum size.

Why is the transfer sized so generously? Not sentiment. The new land is what makes the plan's deterrence mechanism arithmetically and morally possible: it is the cushion that stands between a young, imperfect Palestinian state and the loss of any land Palestinians actually hold today. The next chapter explains this in full. Here it is enough to note that the transfer, the mechanism, and the fixed borders are one machine — remove any part and the other two stop making sense.

"Isn't this just trading prime West Bank land for empty desert?" Partly, yes — and the plan says so rather than disputing it. The annexed blocs are built, watered hill country; the tracts are mostly arid. Three answers. First, the exchange is measured honestly in the table above — in raw area Palestine grows, and the 40%-of-non-desert figure is published precisely so no one has to take the map's word for it. Second, the tracts arrive with the escrowed development program of Annex C — tens of billions in pre-committed capital, on the Gulf model of building cities in exactly this kind of desert — which is a form of value no dunam of hillside carries on its own. Third, the alternative maps on offer transfer nothing at all.

One state, two wings

A Palestinian state in two territories, separated by Israeli land, works only if the separation is legal rather than practical — if a Palestinian can move between the wings as easily as an Israeli drives between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The plan treats this connectivity as core sovereign infrastructure, in the non-strikeable Foundation Package of Annex C, not as a development aspiration:

• The Jenin–Rafah high-speed rail line, running the length of the country through every major Palestinian city — Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, then under Israeli territory to Gaza City, Khan Yunis, Rafah, and into New Gaza. A worker boards in Jenin and is in Rafah by lunch.
• Two sovereign road corridors — largely tunneled or covered along their routes — linking the West Bank to Gaza and to New Gaza, under Palestinian traffic authority end to end.
• Internal link tunnels at the points where the annexation line pinches the West Bank's own geography — most importantly around the Ariel finger — so that no Palestinian journey between Palestinian cities ever passes an Israeli checkpoint or waits on Israeli permission. The test the plan sets itself is travel time, not map aesthetics: the measure of contiguity is how long it takes a truck to get from Nablus to Hebron, and the engineering is sized to make that answer boring.
• The Port of Gaza and Palestine International Airport — the state's own doors to the world, on the timelines set by the failsafes chapter (the port from early years; the airport with airspace reversion at year five).

Jerusalem

Jerusalem is divided into an Israeli zone and a Palestinian zone, with a shared international civic zone between them holding the places sacred to both peoples — the one deliberate exception to the plan's logic of separation, and the one place where the two populations continue to mix daily. It is complicated enough, and important enough, to receive its own chapter.

What is fixed, and what is open

A final word on the difference between this chapter's principles and its particulars. The principles are fixed: maximum absorption without relocation where possible; a contiguous, viable Palestine; a permanently uninhabited buffer between a fixed barrier and a movable one; a transfer that leaves Palestine at 110%, its forever ceiling; connectivity as sovereign infrastructure; no existing community, Israeli or Palestinian, inside the transferred tracts. The particulars — the exact placement of the line around individual settlements, the final settlement schedule of Annex A, the tract boundaries — are the working group's first assignment, and the document publishes its working versions precisely so they can be attacked and improved.

What none of this yet explains is the question this plan exists to answer: what happens after the first rocket. That is the next chapter — the heart of the plan.

Next: The Plan II — The Deterrence Mechanism